Brief Answers to the Big Questions // Stephen Hawking

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Serving as Stephen Hawking’s departing words to the world, Brief Answers to the Big Questions consists of his answers to the most pressing questions facing humankind in the 21st century. The book features a foreword by Eddie Redmayne, who played Hawking in the Oscar-winning movie Theory of Everything, as well as an introduction by Hawking’s colleague and an afterword by his daughter.

I have been feeling the urge to pick something up that would teach me something, fill me with questions, and spark a new curiosity for awhile now, so when this book was gifted to me by Penguin Random House I picked it up almost immediately. It’s not new information to say that Stephen Hawking was one of the most intelligent and inspiring humans to ever live, and his passing last year was met with great sadness. I am so happy that this book exists to distill some of his extremely complicated ideas into something we can all understand and learn from.

The best part about this book is how readable it is. A reader might glance over the table of contents worriedly, knowing that quantum physics and M-theory will certainly come up at some point. But, they needn’t worry because this book feels like a very candid chat with Hawking. He asks himself the questions we all ask ourselves, like will we be taken over by robots? Does God exist? What’s the deal with space travel? And then he comes to a conclusion with his nearly unmatched scientific background and delivers it in colloquial language. It’s comforting to hear Hawking talk about wishing he could be first in line to buy a space travel ticket, or his certainty that we will find a way to strike out into the stars at some point and will probably motivate you greatly to step up your recycling game and inspire the children in your life to consider being a genius scientist!

Overall? If you have a lot of questions and curiosities, you’ll love this book. It’s a great opportunity to learn about things you probably wouldn’t encounter in your everyday life from someone remarkable.

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